#ciyh!adam

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Apropos of nothing, have a thing.

“What do you know about countertops?” “Uh.  Not as convenient for sex as porn would have you believe.” “No, I know--what?  Noah.” Noah doesn’t sound particularly apologetic.  “I know with relative certainty that we both know it’s true.” Adam pinches the bridge of his nose. 

This hardware store smells like concrete and dust, and he can’t hear anything with the phone to his ear, but it had been just less than disorientingly loud when he came in.  He’s already had to dodge no less than three people in store aprons who wanted to help him. “Is Ronan there?” Adam asks. “He’s out with Gansey.  Groceries, I think?  Gansey wanted orange juice, we ran out yesterday.”  He can’t tell if the tone in Noah’s voice is exhaustion from grading finals, stoned boredom, a depressive episode, or some combination of the three.   “Are you okay?” “I’m here,” Noah says cryptically.  “I’m alive.  I exist because I bleed.” Adam’s patience for this entire endeavor is wearing thin, and Noah’s Byronic melancholy is trying even with a full tank of patience.  Adam is running on fumes.  “Can you have Ronan call me when he gets back?” Noah exhales in a way that definitely involves smoke of some kind.  “Why Ronan?” Adam gestures vaguely at the small, fake kitchen he’s standing in front of even though Noah can’t see him.  “He does this home improvement shit.  I’m assuming he can help me figure out what I’m doing.” “You know what they say about assuming,” Noah mumbles.  More clearly he says, “You know, as a homeowner myself, I’m not completely useless with this stuff, either.” “You rent,” Adam reminds him, “A bedroom in an apartment that you’re not on the lease of.” “I am an adult.”  Noah sounds significantly more lucid in his offense.  “I have a mortgage.” “You absolutely don’t.” “If you’re gonna be like that, I’m never inviting you to Passover.” “At your imaginary house?" “You’re an ass.  I’ll tell Ronan to call you.” “Thanks.”

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I present to you Laurence Coke, or, as he is henceforth known, Adam Parrish.  

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i LOVE LOVE LOVE your writing and i saw all your ask prompts and honestly i'd love to just see anything ronan x adam that you felt like writing?

You, dear nonnie, opened a can of worms by leaving this so open-ended.

2. Who is the big spoon/ Who is the little spoon?

Both.  Neither.  They’re not so good at the bed-sharing thing, actually: Adam sleeps on his stomach and half hanging off the bed, Ronan tosses and turns and steals the blankets even though he runs hot.  Adam sleeps very still and not unlike the dead, usually dreamless, Ronan is restless and a light sleeper prone to vivid dreams of both bad and good varieties.  They’ll end up holding hands or touching somehow rather than cuddling, if even that much.6. Who would have really deep emotional thoughts at the middle of the night/ Who would have them in the middle of the day?Ronan is definitely prone to introspection and existential ponderings at night, but Adam has a tendency to overthink himself into depression during the day.  11. Who likes horror movies/ Who likes romance movies?Neither of them like romance movies, but Adam likes horror, from classic Hitchcock straight through to slashers and paranoia-inducing psychological horror like It Follows.  Adam has watched every single horror movie on Netflix no matter how terribly, laughably bad or outrageously violent, and Ronan is consistently baffled by this.  Ronan’s not squeamish by any means, and it’s not that horror movies don’t appeal to him, but he doesn’t have the same affinity for them that Adam does.18. Who is a cat person/ Who is a dog person?Adam is both–he even [SPOILER ALERT] gets Fox before the end of CiYH (I originally intended for Fox to be a cat, wrote him as a dog in a future-set drabble for reasons I still don’t understand, and am now undecided which he is).  Ronan doesn’t have a preference because he’s surprisingly utilitarian in how he thinks about cats and dogs because of growing up on a farm: cats are useful mousers and most dogs serve a practical purpose depending on their breed, and that are cute and make good pets is just a bonus as far as Ronan’s concerned.  25. Who wears the other ones clothes?This one is easy: both.  They swap shirts constantly.  Ronan’s shirts are a little big on Adam, which Adam prefers even for his own shirts, and Adam’s shirts are usually just barely too small for Ronan.  They’ve attempted to swap pants, but Ronan can hardly fit into Adam’s (they’re short and too tight, if he can get into them at all) and Ronan’s are comfortably loose but long on Adam.  26. Who likes to eat healthy/ Who loves junk food?Ronan is a frustratingly picky eater, but he’s also the one more inclined to eat healthily since growing up on a farm can do that to a person.  Adam will readily acknowledge that he’s a fairly indiscriminate pit into which food so long as it isn’t unfried seafood goes, but also that he does prefer junk food because poverty will do that to a person.  Ask them about the time Adam couldn’t tell the difference between spinach, kale, and collard greens at the farmer’s market if you want to see them bicker like a married couple.29. Who is the better cook?Related to the above, it’s Ronan, without a doubt.  Aurora and Niall taught their sons well in the kitchen department.  If you want something microwaved, boiled, charred beyond recognition, rendered inedible and/or possibly hazardous to your health, go to Adam.  34. Who would wear “if lost return to…” t-shirt/ Who would wear “I am…” t-shirt?Ronan wears the “If lost return to…” one, and Adam wouldn’t be caught dead in the “I am…” shirt; he has the one that says “Keep him” instead.  Henry thought he was very funny when he gave the set to them.  38. Who likes to star gaze?Adam.  He loves space and starts and sci-fi.  It’s his one truly “frivolous” interest in that he indulges it for no real reason beyond his fascination with it.  He’ll point out constellations and astral bodies and get excited for things like meteor showers and comet passings and eclipses.  44. Who is active/ Who is lazy?It’s not that Adam is lazy, exactly, but he just really, really likes taking advantage of having nothing to do when he’s completely free for a day, and he absolutely will do nothing but watch Netflix and sleep all day.  Meanwhile, Ronan’s got a gym membership and a schedule he keeps to because he has so much physical energy to work off on a given day, so even his rest/lazy days are busier than Adam’s.  To be fair, though, Adam works three physical jobs on top of being a full-time student in a physically intensive art program and Ronan neither works nor has a demanding major.  They do go hiking with Gansey (et al.) whenever the weather’s good, though, and can be persuaded to go running if you bribe them with food afterwards.

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i'm beating u with 19 degrees rn and a 21 degree high Boston is hell - 🐝🐝 someone keep Adam warm tho I've got five layers of clothing for that

I didn’t post that as a contest, just a statement of fact: he’d be Very Unhappy with a forecast like the one I’m about to endure.  We don’t have it as bad as Boston, that’s for sure.  I think he’d die?  

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prompt: happy adam -🐝🐝🐝

Too unrealistic.I kid, I kid.

November 2019Adam wakes up with a mouthful of red-blond hair, a tingling arm, and a crick in his neck.  Oh no.

The hair moves and some of the feeling starts to come back to his hand.  He flexes his fingers, grimacing through the pins and needles as he tries to figure out how to get out of this without disturbing his companion, and something licks his fingers.  Even numb, the sensation is unmistakable.“Ugh.”  The hair whines at him and turns and licks his chin.  Adam wrinkles his nose and turns away from the attention and gets a very wet nose pressing into his Adam’s apple.  He clearly made himself quite cosy overnight.  “Fox, come on.  Lemme up.”  Fox does not move and rolls onto his belly, cutting off the blood in Adam’s arm again.  Adam rubs Fox’s belly and says, with more sternness than he feels, “You’re lucky you’re cute.”  Fox’s tail wags and his tongue lolls out, breathing dog breath on Adam’s face.  “You’re gross.  Get up.”The dog blinks his amber eye and rolls onto his side before standing up, leaning over to nose at Adam’s face again as he stretches and gets up.  He twists as Adam goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, and eventually follows after to sit in the doorway and watch.  Adam watches him back.This wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but now the idea of waking up and being alone again in his apartment is hopelessly depressing.  He’s even getting used to waking up spooning Fox, who doesn’t seem to understand the “stay at the foot of the bed rule”.  He really is lucky he’s cute.  Fox mostly watches Adam go about the rest of his morning, with a kind of patience Adam hadn’t anticipated when he agreed to foster him.  He seems perfectly content to wait until Adam’s ready to take him out most mornings, so long as Adam pets him everytime he walks past and so long as he gets his breakfast on time.  “Spoiled,” Adam tells him, like he does every morning.  The dog eats better than he does, but he’s loathe to admit that he prefers it that way; he didn’t bring this thing into his house to not treat it properly.  Fox, for his part, never contests being called spoiled and seems to revel in it.  He dances a little as Adam fills his bowls and wraps his medicine in a piece of cold-cut turkey.Across the room, Skype chimes at him.  Adam sets the bowls on the floor and steps over Fox to answer the call.  “So I was on the bus today,” Noah says, without preamble.  “And this dude in a suit sits next to me with a legal pad that just had the word ‘muppets’ written on it.”“You saw that on Tumblr,” Adam says.  “You need new material.”Noah huffs and takes an indignant drag from his cigarette.  It might be a cigarette.  It might also be a joint.  Adam can’t quite tell.  “I don’t have the time to be genuinely clever anymore.  Being an adjunct sucks, man.  It’s like having a job.”Adam wanders back into his kitchen to get his coffee mug, patting Fox as he goes.  “It is a job.  You’ve been there for almost three years.”“Don’t remind me.”  Noah takes another drag and peers into the camera like he can see into Adam’s apartment better.  “Every day gets me closer to my tenure.  Where’s Fox?”“Eating,” Adam tells him when he comes back.  “It’s raining and he hates getting his feet wet, so we’re waiting for it to stop to go for a w-a-l-k in the p-a-r-k.”“Same, if by all that you mean enjoying my day off doing fuck all.”  It’s definitely a joint, then.  “Have you heard from everyone?”  Adam goes to his email in another window, deleting notifications from job hunting websites trying to get him to become a CDL driver despite his chosen parameters, and apartment listings that are no longer relevant.  There’s even a good, old-fashioned porn bot hiding in his spam folder, highly suspect and definitely carrying something unsavory.  It spelled his name wrong (Ada Paraishe sounds like a nice girl, though) and seems to think he’s interested in frisky “big-titted” co-eds, because, obviously, he is, possessing both a dick and a college degree.  It gets deleted.  Another, from an adult site he does subscribe to, gets filed away for later perusal.  “They’re good, enjoying the open road and Gansey’s semester off.”  Noah is reading something else on his screen, his tone slightly absent.  “Henry said they might head out this way if we can make the time to see them next month.  I told him I’d talk to you about it.”“Far be it from me to get in your way.  They’re all, like, yours.”  “They miss you, too, and it’s not that far out of the way when they’re driving aimlessly across the country like this.  He said they’d bring Ronan.”Adam makes a sound that’s equally laugh and groan.  Fox trots over to see what’s wrong, jumping up on his hind legs to whine at Adam’s neck.  Dismayed, Noah asks, “Did you fight?”“No, no, we didn’t fight.  He’s coming in a few weeks, spending the month.”  He sets his mug down to scratch Fox roughly about the ears the way he likes it.  “Fox misses him.  Don’t you?  You miss Ronan?”  Fox’s ears go back and his tail wags so hard it makes him stumble.  He whines and looks at the door like he’s expecting Ronan to walk in at any minute.  “Just Fox, I’m sure,” Noah muses.  “It’s definitely just Fox.”  Fox waves his paw at Adam for more attention the moment he looks away.  “You just miss getting laid, you fiend.”Adam laughs.  “Yeah, that’s all I miss.”Ronan got a hotel room for that exact reason, at least for the first few days.  He was strangely prudish about being despoiled in the dog’s presence.  It’s like he’s forgotten that Adam’s apartment is nearly three times the size of the one he’d had in New York, with enough doors to keep Fox out of the bedroom for an hour or two.  Or more.  Probably more.  It’s been three months.“Your hands are probably all calloused again,” Noah says.  His grin is salacious.  “He’s gonna love it.”“If you think I’ve been jerking off to the point of having callouses, you’re more stoned than I thought.”Noah looks at his joint, considering it for a long, long moment, before shrugging and bringing it to his mouth again.  “Whatever.  I don’t have anywhere to be today.  Tell me I’m wrong, though.  I know I’m not.”Adam raises his eyebrows.  “You sure about that?”“Is that an invitation to investigate my claim?”“Six hours isn’t that far.”“It’s an hour by plane and if you keep joking like that and I’m gonna get the wrong idea,” Noah says.“Joking or not, you already have the wrong idea,” Adam retorts.  Fox rests his head on Adam’s thigh and huffs, his one eye meeting Adam’s and glancing at the window meaningfully.  Adam leans over to lift the shade.  “I’ve gotta go, sun’s finally out and Fox is probably dying.”Noah waves the joint at the webcam.   “Go, enjoy your outing and your vitamin D.  I’m trying to not look stupid at the next faculty meeting, I’ll be here all day.”  He doesn’t wait for Adam to disconnect and ends the call.Adam pulls shorts on over his boxers and rummages around for a clean pair of socks while Fox’s patience starts to run out in the next room.  He even starts whining, guilting Adam into nearly forgetting his keys.  As he gets Fox into his harness for the day, he apologizes (”I know, buddy, I know, I’m hurrying”), his phone buzzes.  hey loserAdam smiles, responds, and tucks it into his pocket as he ushers Fox outside.Hey yourself, Lynch.

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Not at all plot-relevant spoiler: Adam gets a tattoo that is *very* visible in certain clothes. Just because.

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Would you write about pynch talking about marriage/getting engaged?

“Did you get the invitations yet?”“No, not yet.  Why, did you get yours?”“They’re wood.”  Fox picks his head up and whines softly at the scandalized tone in Adam’s voice.  He murmurs an apology to the dog and says into the phone, “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”Ronan snorts.  “Helen went all out.”“I can’t even imagine how expensive they were,” Adam says.  “They’re laser cut and almost a quarter inch thick.  I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with them after I RSVP.”“Ask Blue, probably,” Ronan suggests.  His end of the call is noisy, people shouting around him and construction sounds, and every now and then he turns away from the speaker to say something to someone.  Clarifying earlier instructions, mostly, sometimes correcting.  “She had to have okayed them being that way, right?  Don’t brides have veto power or some shit?”“Probably, yeah, but they did ask Helen to plan this for them, so, like...”“Yeah.”  His voice gets muffled as he lowers his phone.  “No, not those windows, the other ones.  No--there, yeah.  Those.”The construction at the Barns is well underway and has been for weeks now, adding new buildings to the unused pastures and paving old dirt tracks to them.  From the sound of it, they might be ahead of schedule with one of the new barns.  “You ever think about it?” Ronan asks after talking to one of his foremen for several minutes about a potential plumbing issue in the new barn.  “Getting married?”Adam frowns as he strokes Fox’s head.  “A bit.  Not much.  A long time ago, when Blue and I were dating.”“That would’ve been stupid,” Ronan says.  The noise around him fades as he moves away from the construction. “I know that now,” Adam replies tersely.  “But I still thought about it.  Not, like, the wedding part, but the married part.  I wanted that.”“I never did,” Ronan admits.  “I didn’t think it would be an option.”“Makes sense.”Ronan grunts.  It’s thoughtful.   “I like having the option.  I’m just saying.  It’s nice knowing I could, if I wanted to.”“Do you?”“Is this your way of telling me you wanna get hitched, Parrish?”“God, no,” Adam says.  “Did you hear how much they’re spending on the caterer?  I spent that much to rent that shitty apartment for four years.”“Fuck weddings,” Ronan agrees.  There are twenty-five hundred miles between them right now, but just for a second, Adam forgets about the distance, how many more years it will be before he moves back east.  The dog sighs heavily, punctuating Adam’s thoughts as Ronan is pulled into another conversation in Virginia.  In California, Fox carefully gets up to turn around and rest his chin on Adam’s thigh and Adam resigns himself to not being able to get up for at least an hour.  It is nice, having the option, if they ever change their minds.

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#10 for the all pairings in ciyh

You just go right for the heartparts, don’t you, anon?10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?Strap in for a doozy, kids.

I’m gonna start with the minor side pairings that don’t effect the overarching plot or character development, because I’m nothing if not persnickety and ineffectually comprehensive.Fletcher and Archer: Because I could, and so I did.  Where else was I supposed to wedge my favoritest OC and his inveterate life partner (also an OC, belonging to my good good very best friend @archer-and-anders​) and their college au incarnations into my college au fanfic?  Why, as fellow students on the periphery of the protagonists’ social circles, of course!  They weren’t made together or to be together, but they are meant to be together forever, across any and all universes.  It’s just how it is, and I don’t make the rules.Declan and Ashley: I latched on to his POV chapter in TRK mentioning her as a present-tense girlfriend and not a past-tense one, and I want them to be the cool, sexy, affably morally neutral Greenmantles 2.0 with matching Audis and a Mr. and Mrs. Smith vibe.  Also, my girl Ashley?  She’s rad and Declan doesn’t really deserve her because she’s so much cooler than he is.Maura and Calla: BLUE’S MOMS.  Because how could I not, when there’s no Artemus to worry about, a Persephone in the mix, or a Mr. Gray to pair Maura off with?  Of course I went the “they’re in lesbians” route!  If things focused more on the rest of the group and not just on Adam and Ronan, they’d make appearances, but as things stand right now, they’re not slated to turn up at all, which I hope to rectify in The Rewrite.

On to the played-with and past-tense pairings.  Funnily enough, most of these involve Adam because of a very particular headcanon I have for him and am deeply attached to.Ronan and Noah:  Oh, Noah, my dear sweet boy, he just made his way around the whole group, didn’t he?  This is actually only implied in passing once in Ch3 and never mentioned again, and it was from before I realized how potentially icky that was depending on when exactly it happened, since that chapter has Noah saying he’s 28 and Ronan implying that "{Noah]’s girlfriend and all of [Noah]’s friends are 21″, which is wrong, because Gansey turns 21 at some point between Ch18 and Ch20, which is almost two months later.  I’m going on record here and now to say that, no, this didn’t actually happen and this passing mention of it is an instance of Early Installment Weirdness that will be nixed in The Rewrite.  Adam and Tad: This wasn’t supposed to become quite the thing it did in my mind; I threw Tad into CiYH for Drama caused by Ronan’s jealous streak and his possessiveness of Adam, and I ended up getting really attached to my version of Tad, perhaps a little wrongheadedly.  I intended to push this from “played with” into “actually happens” to fuel Ronan and Adam fighting for much longer than they did, which I also decided against about... two chapters ago.  Instead I opted to have Ronan continue to be jealous over something that was never going to happen because it seemed in character for him.  Adam and Brandy: Okay.  So.  This plays into the aforementioned headcanon I have for Adam but also has some bearing on the plot, so I can’t get to into the details on this one (especially since Brandy is a present-tense character as of Ch24).  I can say this, though, because it relates to Adam’s relationship with Blue: I didn’t want him to be as inexperienced as Blue, as in a virgin who’d never been kissed before they’d started dating each other.  So I had to give Adam an ex-girlfriend he’d been physically intimate with, who was (probably) slightly more experienced than he was back in high school.  Ronan and Kavinsky: Contrary to what most people might think, I didn’t include this oairing because I wanted to write Rovinsky into CiYH.  I knew going into this project that I wanted to write Kavinsky a particular way, and that I was writing Ronan a particular way, and that I was walking a very fine line between making their backstory work and making it seem out of character for Ronan.  In my mind, to play out the full extent of Ronan’s teenage trauma without magic and without his friends (save Gansey, who at the time lived hundreds of miles away) but with the grim reality and formative nature Niall’s death had on him intact, I needed to include the only other character he’d known in high school: Kavinsky.  How could I play out Ronan’s character (again, without magic) and Kavinsky the way I intended to portray him (also without magic) as realistically as possible, despite the very murky waters I’d be treading the entire time?  By giving them an intimate history with each other, even though I was basically writing Rovinsky into CiYH.Adam and Blue: This one’s only a little bit self-serving, because I actually really like them paired together and I wanted them to have dated and boned prior to the start of CiYH.  I had that in mind when I wrote the first chapter, and it didn’t even come up back then.  Funny how that happens.   But yeah, I had a soft spot for Adam being Blue’s first in most of the major ways and I projected a lot of my relationship frustrations and drama onto them because catharsis (and they’re the only pairing I could actually do that with and have it make sense).

And now, for the actual factual present-tense pairings you’re all here for.Blue and Gansey:  I guess I have to out myself here as being a Bluesey hater.  “Hater” is probably way too strong a word, because I’m honestly more ambivalent to it.  It’s boring to me.   But I had to include it because I had to, right?  Right, because this is a TRC fic.  That’s pretty much it, and it’s cute, I guess, but.   Yeah.  Fortunately it developed into something I could get behind, to an extent, because they’re both also paired off with characters I think they’re both better suited for than each other.Gansey and Henry: Yes, this is canon!  No, I have not made that clear in anything I’ve written!  Yes, that is horrible of me and I fully acknowledge that and plan to rectify it in The Rewrite!  Yes, it’s actually happening throughout CiYH, yes other characters do know about it, and yes Henry is actually around more often than he is not.  This is all a major failing on my part because I never developed a good voice for him (or Gansey, for that matter) and, as I’ve said before, I honestly had no idea I’d ever get to a point where I’d realize it was a major misstep to not include him from the get, because I started CiYH well before TRK came out and I’d initially been hesitant to heavily feature a character we knew nothing about (this is based on past experiences I’ve had in fandoms, with getting attached to characters pre-release and being hugely disappointed by them in canon).  This is my single highest priority for The Rewrite, and I can’t emphasize that enough.Blue and Noah:  MY OTEEP.  I’m infinity-percent serious when I say that, I really am.  I’ve said it a million times before, but I ship Blue and Noah together harder than I think I’ve ever shipped literally anything since--I admit these freely and fly these particular fandom colors proudly--Shakarian and Handers.  Part of this is projecting, part of this is because my version of Noah is, in fact, so compelling to me that I’m planning on giving him a spin-off of his own that delves into his backstory and follows his personal arc as it develops parallel to CiYH.  I can’t wait because I’ll get to delve so much more into this relationship.  Blue, Noah, and Gansey: This is the amalgam of my gripes with Bluesey and my undying love for Blue/Noah.  You’ve gotta love that happy, comfortable, casual polyamory.  This is something I’m really looking forward to exploring more in both the Noah Spin-Off and The Rewrite, especially since I’ve dedicated considerable thought to how exactly this relationship comes to be, how it works (i.e. Blue’s time with both of them, their time as a trio, Noah and Gansey’s time as roommates/friends, Gansey’s time with Henry), and how Noah and Gansey (who don’t exist as a pairing without Blue’s influence) work.  It’s easy in a way Adam and Ronan aren’t, despite how complicated and difficult it looks on the surface, but there’s still a lot of room for Drama, because there’s a lot of conflicting dynamics insofar as their three distinct cultures and family lives are concerned, and also lulz for that same exact reason.  Adam and Ronan: Because, at the end of the day, I wanted to write these angry, sharp-edged handsome dudes being in messy, complicated, aesthetically pleasing love with each other.   And boning down, a lot, with vigor and enthusiasm.  Really.  That’s it.  It’s just complicated in context, but the reality is actually that simple.